[Wikipedia-l] Re: Death to the comma count!

Mon Mar 10 16:37:24 UTC 2003

>Aha, again demonstrating the obsession over the count. Why 
was it
>important to hit or not hit 100,000? Because of an offhand 
remark made a
>couple years ago about "we hope to reach 100,000 articles"?

Actually, milestone is important. While some seems 
meaningless including most active wikipedians, some statics 
are important, including the number of register users and 
the number of articles.

We want to know what we have achived, where we are heading 
for and better, we want to show off such.

>Why? What's *wrong* with small articles?

Because some people short articles are useless. It is a 
wrong concept. Needless to say, the length of an article 
indicates nothing about the usefulness of the article.

I strongly believe the mere stub article of Japanese author 
written in English is much more precious than the list of 
songs with some stupid criteria.

>> > Unless a better count system is proposed, I will 
replace the comma check
>> > with a greater-than-zero-size check within twelve hours.
>> 
>> And what about the people who get the digest after your 
12 hour deadline? How 
>> about the other people who only check or respond to 
Wikipedia posts during 
>> the week? Shouldn't they have a say in this? 

Brion's proposal is fair. While there is still objection, 
greater-than-zero-size is more fair than comma counting. 
After change, we can still keep debate.

>They had their say months ago when no one was able to 
decide what to do.
>Do you really think a new consensus is going to come in 24 
hours? 48? A
>week? A month? A year? I think you're sorely mistaken if 
so. But,
>please, feel free to prove me wrong.
>
>Tell you what. I'll hold off until Wednesday night. Come up 
with a
>consensus on a better system by then, or comma-count shall 
be replaced
>with not-blank-count circa 07:00 UTC, 13 March. (11pm on 
the 12th here
>in PST.)

I am afraid we don't reach the consensus this time too. I 
suggest that we should at least change the counting system 
of ja wikipedia in the exact way you proposed. Leaving 
unfair system around is more injust than keeping debate 
hoping to reach the consensus.

Besides, it figures no one supports the current comma 
counting system, then why do we have to wait to overthrow it?